Cats and Dogs =D

Today in VB, we had to make our own classes and properties. To make it easier to understand, it was realted to a cat and a dog, two physical things with very obvious properties(name, furcolour etc) and actions, like meowing or going for 'walkies'.
I thought it was really interesting, still confusing for me now, but with a little more exploration i'll hopefully understand it better. From what I could gather, it opens an extreme amount of doors for programming things with-in VB, and add's another complex level to it. Heh.

First of all, with in the Dog Class;
It had properties and methods. The properties were the things it has, like a name, age and a breed. And it's methods are like barking and going for walkies

With the dog class, it has similar properties, but its methods were different, having meow and chase mouse functions.

VB Classes and Objects

In VB.NET, a class is that chunk of code mentioned earlier. You've been using Classes all the time during this course. The Form you've started out with is a Class. If you look right at the top of the code window for a Form, you'll see:
Public Class Form1
The word "Public" means that other code can see it. Form1 is the name of the Class
If you look at the bottom of the coding window, you'll see End Class, signifying the end of the code for the Class.
When you place a Button or a textbox on the Form, you're really adding it to the Form Class.
When you start the Form, VB does something called instantiation. This basically means that your Form is being turned into an Object, and all the things needed for the creation of the Form are being set up for you (Your controls are being added, variables are being set up an initialised, etc).
And that's the basic difference between a Class and an Object: A Class is the code itself; the code becomes an Object when you start using it.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), pronounced /ˈæski/ is a coding standard that can be used for interchanging information, if the information is expressed mainly by the written form of English words. It is implemented as a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character-encoding schemes—which support many more characters than did the original—have a historical basis in ASCII.
Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963, a major revision in 1967,and the most recent update in 1986.Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.
ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing, mostly-obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed; 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic.The ASCII character-encoding scheme is the most-commonly-used character set on the Internet

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard, Unicode consists of a repertoire of more than 100,000 characters, a set of code charts for visual reference, an encoding methodology and set of standard character encodings, an enumeration of character properties such as upper and lower case, a set of reference data computer files, and a number of related items, such as character properties, rules for normalization, decomposition, collation, rendering and bidirectional display order (for the correct display of text containing both right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic or Hebrew, and left-to-right scripts).[1]
The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit organization that coordinates Unicode's development, has the ambitious goal of eventually replacing existing character encoding schemes with Unicode and its standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) schemes, as many of the existing schemes are limited in size and scope and are incompatible with multilingual environments.
Unicode's success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread and predominant use in the internationalization and localization of computer software. The standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including XML, the Java programming language, the Microsoft .NET Framework and modern operating systems.
Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8 (which uses 1 byte for all ASCII characters, which have the same code values as in the standard ASCII encoding, and up to 4 bytes for other characters), the now-obsolete UCS-2 (which uses 2 bytes for all characters, but does not include every character in the Unicode standard), and UTF-16 (which extends UCS-2, using 4 bytes to encode characters missing from UCS-2).